More Than a Third of Young DC Adults in Poverty Last Year

My recent post on the new poverty rates for the District of Columbia prompted an email from Deborah Shore. She wanted to know what I could tell her about poverty among older teens and young adults.

I’m sure many of you know why. For the rest, Deborah is the executive director of Sasha Bruce Youthwork, a nonprofit she founded 40 years ago. It now provides emergency shelter, transitional housing and a range of services to homeless and at-risk youth in the District.

Deborah also chairs the board of the National Network for Youth — a large coalition of organizations that serve and advocate for runaway, homeless and disconnected youth, i.e., those who are neither in school nor working.

I’m grateful for her question because, like many others who reported on the results of the American Community Survey, I didn’t initially pay attention to the figures for young adults.

Children, of course. Yet the very high poverty rates for them, both in the District and nationwide, can’t be neatly separated from poverty among teens and young adults because some are parents — mostly single mothers, it seems.

The Census Bureau doesn’t tell us a whole lot about youth in poverty, though I suspect one could dig up a fair amount if one had the tools to work with the detailed tables that expand what it reports from a special piece of the Current Population Survey. I don’t.

So I went searching among the thousands of tables the Bureau uses to report the results of the ACS — a better source for community-level data anyway. Here’s what I found there and in some other reports.

Folded into the District’s child poverty rate are roughly 2,925 children on the verge of adulthood, i.e., 16 and 17 year olds. They represent about a tenth of all poor D.C. children — a far lower percent than the very youngest.

But many more who’d just crossed the threshold were officially poor. The Census Bureau reports 21,000 young D.C. adults, i.e., 18-24 year olds, in poverty. This makes for an age-group poverty rate of a bit under 37%. It’s more than 11% higher than the national poverty rate for the age group.

And (here comes the bombshell ) nearly one in four young adults in the District lived in deep poverty last year, i.e., had incomes at or below half the applicable threshold. For one person living alone, deep poverty means a maximum annual income of $6,060 — and for a single parent with one child, a maximum of $8,029.

By far and away more young adults in the District were deeply poor than poor, but less so. This was not true for young adults nationwide. For them, the deep poverty rate was 13.7%, according to the ACS, or 10.2%, according to CLASP’s analysis of the Current Population Survey.

Well, what are we to make of all this? One thing is that the poverty rates reflect the unusually hard time young adults are having in the labor market.

The unemployment rate for 18-19 year olds was 19.8% last month, as compared to 5.4% for everyone older who was also jobless and actively looking for work. The rate for 20-24 years olds was 11.4%. And rates for both groups were even higher for men.

Such figures as we have suggest that far from all jobless young people were actively looking. Last year, only 64.7% of 18-24 year olds were either working or seeking work. This is nearly 8.7% lower than in 2000.

At the same time, those who were working didn’t earn much. The median for 18-24 year olds was $17,760 in 2012 — and for those with less than a high school education, a mere $13,510.

Try as I might, I haven’t found comparable figures for young adults in the District. The Economic Policy Institute provides a couple that come close, however. It tells us that 14.8% of D.C. workers under 25 were unemployed last year, not including those who were still enrolled in school or those who’d decided it was futile to look.

An additional 26.2% were underemployed, i.e., working part time, though they wanted full-time work or had looked during the year, but given up. (I don’t know why EPI doesn’t count the latter as unemployed.)

Both rates are due partly to the fact that young workers generally have a tougher time getting — and staying — employed than workers with more job experience. This is especially true when there are far more job-seekers than jobs to go around.

But the premium our local labor market puts on college degrees is probably also a factor, as the DC Fiscal Policy Institute’s analysis of 2012 unemployment rates shows.

And so far as good jobs are concerned, only one of the “high demand/high wage” jobs in the District requires only a high school diploma or the equivalent — and only two others less than a four-year college degree.

Both the poverty and the un/underemployment rates help explain the surge of homeless families in the District, since nearly half the parents who spent at least part of last winter in the DC General family shelter were 18-24 year olds.

They also help explain some first-time-ever figures for homeless youth who had no family members with them. Of which more in my next post.

Blog In Brief

Hi! I'm Kathryn Baer. This blog is one way I use my skills and experience to support policies that will reduce the hardships poor people suffer and the causes of poverty. You can find out more about me here .